Top 40 Susanne Bier Quotes

For me, grief is a static thing, and my movies have an extremely dynamic sort of movement.

If I go home from a day of shooting, and I haven’t at some point felt the magic, I’m really frustrated.

As a filmmaker, I always try not to concern myself with the outcome of things. I make the movie, and I do that as honestly and good as I can. I don’t want to pollute my thoughts with what is going to happen with it afterwards, because I have to work inside-out.

I don’t feel I have an issue with listening or understanding English in any sort of way.

I would say I’m basically interested in human beings, and I don’t really care whether they’re men or women. I think my comprehension is about the same for both.

A significant number of women who have been ill or had marital issues feel they have no value, and society is so keen on telling us that’s the case.

Anders Thomas Jensen and I had talked about making a movie which addressed the cancer issue, and we didn’t want to make it heavy-handed. We wanted to do something which had a lot of hope in it. And then for some reason we came up with a romantic comedy.

I believe in rules. I believe in artistic limitations, and I always have. I’ve always thought that setting out a set of rules before you start, and then being completely consistent with them, is the only way to make a really good film.

I’m extremely straightforward. And I can’t do that sort of traditional girl thing of saying one thing that actually means something else. I never understood it, and I still don’t understand it.

I don’t want actors to be writers. I think it’s too much responsibility.

I don’t do a lot of rehearsal. I don’t like rehearsals. I rehearse the day or morning. I spend one hour and a half with all the actors, and we go over the scenes, and we change it and change the dialogue, and we do a lot of things to it, but prior to shooting, I don’t really rehearse.

There are certain things you cannot accept. There are certain things that human beings cannot tolerate.

I don’t know that there’s more bullying or whether it’s just more talked about. It seems to me that possibly that there’s been a lot of bullying all the time, but at the moment, it’s something that people are talking about.

Parents can shape a child, but a great teacher can, too.

Women, nowhere in the world, have the kind of important position in society in the amount that they ought to have.

My mother has had breast cancer twice. And my mother has always been this very positive human being: a glass-half-full type. Like, when she was in treatment and feeling really bad, she would always talk about some nurse that was particularly nice to her.

I never have particular actors planned when I’m in the process of writing.

In a way, our family is our modern identity.

The foundations of our lives are far more fragile than we think. So we are severely shaken when life turns out to have a will of its own.

I’ve got this fear of becoming comfortable.

At some stage in most people’s lives, things turn upside down, and nothing is as you expected it to be.

You win an Oscar, and the movie that comes after that is always going to be compared.

We always want to find good and bad guys, and I don’t believe in that.

I think the good thing about Dogme is that it forces you into an extreme sense of reality because there’s no artificial light and no set design and all of those icings on the cake that you usually have on a movie.

I’ve always been slightly hesitant about generalizing movies made by men and women being different in their nature; I think movies by each director are different. Having said that, I think that it’s kind of disgraceful that there aren’t more female directors.

In a way, the whole notion of a blueprint of a building is not that different from a script for a movie. A sequence of spaces, which is what you do as an architect, is really the same as a sequence of scenes.

I think that being Jewish has generated an extremely strong sense of the importance of family. If I look at my Scandinavian colleagues, they don’t have that urgency about family. All my movies are about that.

I hate when the sun is high and there are no shadows. If I could do super high-budget movies, I would only shoot when the sun starts to get low – but you can’t just shoot for four hours every day.

If you look at children’s stories in fairy tales, they’re pretty brutal.

Having done a Dogme film taught me the beauty of simplicity and austerity.

For years, whenever I’d been travelling and came back to Copenhagen, I’d think: ‘People are so stylish.’ And it’s not any one class. It’s everyday life.

I don’t feel that I’m strictly Danish; I don’t feel that my sense of humor is strictly Danish or my human sensibility is strictly Danish.

I am very close to my family, and there’s something life-affirming about that. Even if you feel completely different from them and have totally different views on politics and ethics, you’re still family and have that immediate acceptance.

I’m a huge fan of Richard Curtis – there’s real grief, real compassion in his films as well as cheekiness; it’s a wonderful cocktail.

Oftentimes, reality is much worse than what you can put in a movie.

I think most of my films all have a certain tone or intensity in them. They are tense, and you kind of anticipate some kind of catastrophe, but you’re not quite sure.

A lot of people who live in Denmark will understand Danish but not necessarily speak it.

People don’t necessarily do evil deeds because they want to; people happen to do something with horrible consequences even if they meant to be kind.

I generally edit quite heavily. In general, there aren’t many scenes that are sitting where they sat in the script in the final form.

I have a slight controversy with the Dogme brethren because I’ve been saying that rules are to be interpreted; not that I haven’t followed the rules, because I don’t see the point of submitting yourself to a set of rules if you don’t follow them. But having said that, it is always a lot of interpretation.